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February 08, 2019

Build the "wall" — out of fiber optic cable?

Business Insider reports on this intriguing option.

First, it works, and was already tested and proven to work a decade ago.

And, contra kneejerk responses by MAGA-heads it worked well enough already back then to tell the difference between weights of people and between individuals and groups.

Indeed, even the Border Patrol is down with it. Well, people on the line are:
"We have a tactical advantage of being able to classify a report, a sensor hit, whatever indication we have of possible illegal activity along the border," Stephen Spencer, an assistant chief patrol agent in Tucson, told the agency in a press release posted Thursday. 
He continued: "It might take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get to point of that indication. The benefits [of the new technologies] are a rapid response to make the judgment call whether that is something we need to assign assets to look at. If I spend an hour and a half walking to discover a goat tripped a device, I've just wasted three hours of my patrol time."
Customs and Border Protection refused to respond for comment.

Here in Tex-ass, the not-totally wingnut Rep. Will Hurd is down with it. Of course, the biggie is Senate Republicans.

More from Hurd here, in part echoing Spencer
"A physical barrier in some places does make sense, when there's urban-to-urban contact," he said. "But it's not along all 2,000 miles of the border, and there's probably only a handful of miles where something like that is needed." 
The main problem with a physical wall, he said, was that Border Patrol's response time can take between hours and days in remote areas, rendering a wall effectively useless. 
"You need something that can detect a threat and track that threat until you're able to deploy your most important resource — the men and women of Border Patrol — to do that interdiction," he said.
Bingo. As opposed to this stupidity I got on Twitter:
And, of course, Spencer and Hurd directly refudiate this guy.

So do other news stories, which show immigrants climbing Trump's precious wall with ladders, mayors of border cities saying a wall isn't needed and more.

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